hallucinatory drumming
Jann Parry in London
BODE LAWAL is a man possessed. In his solos for Sakoba Dance Theatre’s programme, New Moves in African Dance (at the Purcell Room), he seems in the grip of spirits, who speak to him and for him. Sometimes they are ancestral spirits, sometimes his own sense of curiosity and adventure – or, in his newest piece, Junk/Junkie, drug demons.
Lawal came to Britain from Nigeria 10 years ago. His original aim, when he founded Sakoba, was to teach and perform traditional African dance – or African Peoples’ Dance, as the Arts Council called it, because many of the performers were British or Caribbean- born.
During the Eighties, the dance form remained far more conservative than music from Africa, which mixed genres with great versatility.
Biographies of the three musicians touring with Sakoba reveal a typically wide range of experience: dancers are just beginning to catch up. Sakoba’s four, all British-born, come from contemporary dance and musical theatre backgrounds, with additional training in African dance.
Lawal is now trying to create his own dance language – a hybrid style, with strong African roots – in the way that Shobana Jeyasingh is doing with Indian dance and Pit Fong Loh with oriental dance.
The process is an arduous one, if the fusion is to work. Bode Lawal has made a breakthrough by providing a mixed bill of dances, each exploring different themes and styles. He is concerned with urban distress: his Junk/Junkie persona is self-destructive, almost driven out of mind and body by drugs and the hallucinatory drumming of Dready, the Guinean percussionist.
Lawal shifts between states of clarity and derangement in a performance that is both postmodern and tribal-trancelike. In Release, his new group piece to commissioned music by Tunde Jegede, four troubled city- dwellers are equally unhappy in their skins: they succeed, however, in shedding their rage and frustration, along with their clothes, until they are truly free spirits.
The Lycra unitards they wear in the second half reveal every articulation of their supple bodies, in movements that draw on t’ai chi, Latin and African sources: down- to-earth dance seems at the same time to float.
Shadows cast on the Purcell Room’s wooden walls could be Matisse’s dancing figures. Sakoba has started straddling cultures, moving as readily between worlds as its multi-talented musicians.